BALANCE AT WORK BLOG

Many people within financial services are familiar with the Kolbe system of measuring ‘Action Modes’. An individual’s Kolbe profile is a good tool for coaching and team development and I’ve used it in these ways, before I started using Harrison Assessments (HA).

There are similarities between the two approaches (online, accessible to any sized organisation, multiple uses) and I won’t explore the theory behind them in this article. There are three differences that prompted my decision:

1. Level of detail

If I tell you my Kolbe is 8652 (Strategic Planner), experienced Kolbe users will know quite a lot about me. It will be a generalisation, of course, as each number is a score out of 10 for each of the four different modes (Fact Find, Follow Through, Quick Start and Implementor).

I admit I can’t give you a quick summary, in numbers or words, of my HA profile, although you’ll find some of the details on our website. This is because HA measures 156 different traits on a 1-10 scale, resulting in reports that are unique to the individual, rather than classifying them as an ‘Innovator’ or ‘Mediator’ for example. The 156 traits are made up of personality, task preferences, interests, work environment preferences and motivations.

The reports themselves provide detailed interpretation for the end user. For example, for a job candidate who has a low score on ‘Analyses Pitfalls’: “Joe usually does not enjoy analysing the potential difficulties of plans or strategies and may sometimes neglect to do so. Therefore, it would be best if he were to receive other input before making important strategic decisions. Joe’s lack of enjoyment of analysing potential problems will probably have a somewhat negative impact on job satisfaction and/or performance.” How good would it be to know this information before you appoint a new manager?

This is focussed, practical information you can use right away, either in a second interview or to coach the new employee.

2. Data utilisation

One set of data from one 20-30 minute online questionnaire is used to produce all the reports below, listed by application:

3. Customisability

Because HA is based on work performance research, there is the facility to compare employees and/or candidates to job templates for a specific role. There are over 200 generic templates in the system and each one can be customised to the requirements of the job and the employer. We’ve even adjusted templates to check for a good match with the manager.

For our clients in financial services, we have developed a set of templates which we then modify to their specific business requirements. For example, it they’re hiring a paraplannner and want them to have significant client contact, we would ensure traits such as ‘Outgoing’ and ‘Diplomatic’ are included in the template.

This flexibility can also be applied to staff and team development. If, for example, a broker is just not brining in the new business they were hire to achieve, we could assess their scores on a range of relevant traits, including traits such as ‘Persistent’ and ‘Optimistic’ and coach them to better performance by building on their areas of strength. Of course – ideally – you would have known these scores before you hired them!

The detailed reports, as you can imagine, are invaluable for both team and individual coaching. For teams, we are also able to plot all team members on the same chart, to give an easy to read overview of the team’s strengths and challenges.

The reason I chose to train and gain certification with Harrison Assessments: So I can provide my clients with the best available information for people management decisions and coaching.

BALANCE AT WORK BLOG

You’ve just made the most common mistake of managers who decide to hire: Missing the first step.

Allow me to explain…

Have you ever found yourself interviewing a job applicant and thinking “This is a total waste of time”?

Usually, you’ve come to this conclusion within a few seconds. Unfortunately, you’re committed to carry on the interview until a reasonable time has elapsed for the candidate to believe they have had a fair hearing.

Why was this person, so clearly unsuited to the role, even sitting in front of you?

They were there because they had submitted an impressive application in response to an advertisement.

Clearly something was wrong in the process. Either

1. the advertisement was not specific enough about the requirements or

2. the application was not adequately scrutinised for a match to the specific requirements of the role.

Start your recruitment process with one simple question and I guarantee it will be much faster, easier and more productive:

“What would it take for someone to be an outstanding performer in this role?”

(Because you only want to hire outstanding performers, don’t you?)

Here are three simple steps to help you define what you’re looking for in your ideal candidate:

1. List all your requirements for the role (=success factors). Include

skills

qualifications

work experience

values

attitudes

motivation

interpersonal skills

task and work environment preferences

interests

2. Now decide which of these you must have (=essential criteria) and those which would be nice to have (=desirable criteria).

3. Are there any personal characteristics which you definitely don’t want (= traits to avoid)? For example, you might wish to avoid employing someone who has a strong desire for money while lacking the personal drive required to earn it.

Now – and not before – you are ready to ‘go to the market’ with your requirements.

Then:

Get ready to receive applications that are more relevant and targeted;

Stick to your wish list;

Evaluate the success of your recruitment campaign by the quality of the candidates, not by the number of applicants; and

Avoid wasting time in interviews that should never have been scheduled!

Tip: Review your job descriptions to include success factors for more efficient and effective recruiting next time round.

BALANCE AT WORK BLOG

When I met Matthew Farrell, Principal of Five Pillars Financial Planning, he was in the process of selecting a new financial planner to support the growth of his business.

Matthew was impressed with a candidate but confided that one of the traps he’d fallen into in the past was loving someone at the interview, only to find they didn’t live up to expectations on the job. This is a familiar scenario, especially when faced with a charming and enthusiastic interviewee.

To ensure he didn’t make the same mistake this time, Matthew decided to use Harrison Assessments to determine the candidate’s suitability for the role.

Matthew was keen to:

1. Have a quick answer and
2. Ensure the candidate had traits that met the specific requirements of the business.

Within 24 hours of our first conversation, Matthew had the result he needed and within 48 hours, the candidate had been offered and had accepted the role. This is how we did it:

1. After the first meeting, we sent the candidate a ‘questionnaire invitation’ so that he could complete the online assessment overnight.
2. We sent Matthew a draft job template for him to consider.
3. Next morning, Matthew and I discussed the template and I made adjustments to the template online.
4. The candidate had completed the assessment so we were able to immediately run the reports, comparing him to the customised template.
5. Matthew and I discussed the reports and the candidate’s suitability straight away.

We asked Matthew to comment on his experience of using the Harrison Assessments:“I was looking for an objective assessment tool that took away the temptation of me being swayed by the candidate’s pleasing personality and charm. I wanted to know if the candidate possessed the internal qualities required to perform in the position.

We had always tested for aptitude or the ability to perform the technical aspects of the position but we lacked a process to tackle the question of whether the prospective candidate had the disposition or personal qualities necessary to thrive in their new role.”

TIP: Don’t let your heart rule your head! Get some objective advice before you make decisions about the people in your business.

In the past, interviews have been used as the primary means assess attitude, motivation, and job behaviour. However, even if interviewers are extremely intuitive, there are many reasons why accurately assessing job behaviour with a normal interview process is nearly impossible.

1. Interviewers do not have access to a real behavioural success formula. There are dozens of behavioural factors that either promote success or inhibit success for any one job. Interviewers rarely have access to a job formula that identifies the behavioural success factors, weights the success factors against each other. And formulates how different levels of these success factors impact job performance

2. Even if the interviewer has access to such a formula, the interviewer would need to accurately assess specific levels of each applicant’s behaviour for each of the job success factors.

3. Some people are skillful at being interviewed. However, being skillful at an interview usually does not relate to job success and therefore it often confuses them into thinking that such skillfulness will relate to job success.

4. The interviewee aims to tell the interviewer what he/she thinks will be viewed as the best response. The interviewer aims to determine how much of what the person is saying reflects genuine attitudes and behaviour and how much is related to just trying to get the job. This in itself is extremely difficult to resolve in the short period of the interview.

5. Interviewers are biased. Research clearly shows that interviewers routinely give favorable responses to people who are similar to themselves, and less favorable responses to people who are different from themselves. In the end, the result is very likely to come down to how well the interviewer likes the candidate rather than how well the candidate fits the behavioural requirements of the job.

Many interviewers claim insights into the personality of applicants and certainly some interviewers are quite perceptive. However, predicting job success is an entirely different matter. It is not sufficient to perceive a particular quality of a person. Rather, the interviewer must be able to accurately assess the magnitude of each of dozens of qualities in relationship to a complex formula of behavioural requirements for a particular job. This is nearly an impossible task without the aid of significant research and tools.

Assessment research shows that interviewing has a moderate ability to predict job success. However, this doesn’t mean that interviewers can predict job behaviour. The moderate ability to predict job success comes as a result of exploring the candidate’s resume, previous experience, education, and job knowledge rather than the interviewer’s ability to predict job behaviour. If you doubt my assertion, I suggest you try the following experiment. Have your interviewers conduct the interview without ever seeing the resume and without discussing past experience, education or skills. Then have them write down their job success prediction. Later, you can compare this prediction to the actual job success. In fact, conducting interviews in this way would be so difficult that I doubt anyone would even attempt it.

Next in this series: Job behaviour assessments compared to personality assessments

For most jobs, suitability factors are about 50% of the job success factors. Therefore, effectively measuring suitability is an essential part of assessment. However, suitability is much more difficult to measure than eligibility. The first challenge is to determine which suitability factors relate to job success for a particular job. However, even when that is determined, assessing job suitability accurately is unlikely unless you can determine how different levels of each suitability factor impacts job success.

For example, you may determine that self-motivation is an important factor for job success for a particular job. But you still need to determine how detrimental or how beneficial each level of self-motivation. In some cases, the more the person has the better. However, for other jobs, a moderate level is enough.

Each level of each factor needs to be scored according to its impact on performance. That is why HA contains significant previous research regarding suitability factors and their impact on performance for different job types and for different jobs. Without this, it is nearly impossible to assess behaviour effectively.

Suitability factors are behavioural and are much more difficult for people to change than eligibility factors. This makes it even more important to accurately assess behaviour during the recruitment process. Most organisations hire people for their eligibility and then try to develop their suitability. And in many cases fire them for their lack of suitability. Since behaviour is fundamentally more difficult to change than eligibility, it is better to hire people who already have the suitability for the job.

To illustrate different aspects of suitability, here are some examples of job behaviour factors that could be relevant to a specific job. These are just a small sample of more than one hundred important suitability factors that could relate to job success.

• What types of things will an applicant or employee accomplish or put off?

• What motivates them?

• How will they communicate, influence and lead?

• How well they can handle autonomy, freedom and responsibility?

• How much initiative will they take?

• How much will they persist when faced with obstacles?

• How innovative will they be?

• How much will they accept and respond appropriately to feedback?

• To what degree will they become autocratic, dogmatic, dictatorial or controlling?

• How much will they resist change and/or be rigid?

• What behaviours will they exhibit under stress?

• How much will they be blunt or harsh in their communications?

• How much will they tend to be blindly optimistic, impulsive, illogical or easily influenced?

• To what degree will they avoid difficult decisions?

• How well will they organise and handle details?

• How much will they be scattered or chaotic in their approach to projects or planning?

• How much will they seek to learn, grow and excel?

• What kind of recognition do they need?

• As a leader, how well will they provide direction?

• How well will they enforce policy and standards?

• How likely are they to steal?

• How well do they handle conflicts?

• How reasonable will they be when assessing the value of their contributions to the company?

Assessing people for jobs is the most important task of any organisation. The quality of assessment ultimately determines the performance of new hires as well as the ability of the organisation to effectively develop employees. It affects every important aspect of the organisation’s success including management effectiveness, sales volume, customer retention and productivity. Assessment is not merely one of the functions of the Human Resource Department. It is the essential foundation for effective talent acquisition and talent management.

High quality assessment used at the point of hire enables you to have the greatest impact on performance and productivity in your organisation. High quality assessment of applicants during the recruitment process results in less time and money spent on training and developing employees. This enables management to focus on important strategic issues. Good assessment reduces training costs, minimises losses due to poor decisions, increases employee retention and can even provide a foundation for better teamwork.

Effective assessment also provides huge benefits for employee development. Assessing existing employees makes employee development much more efficient and effective. Good assessment can enable employees to clearly understand their performance in relationship to the job requirements. This can be a great boost to employee motivation. It can also provide managers with a means of pinpointing the development areas that will provide the greatest impact on performance. Harrison Assessments™ Talent Assessment System even goes a step further by providing managers and coaches with effective tools for encouraging and enlisting top performance as well as providing guidelines for developing specific job success behaviours. In addition, reports also help employees to better understand how to apply their strengths for their career development. These are key areas that promote talent retention and motivation.

"The last couple of years at batyr has seen incredible growth and the Balance at Work team has supported us along the way. They have helped us improve leadership skills across the team by helping us source and manage mentors, and even engaging as mentors themselves. As a young and fresh CEO Susan has also supported me personally with genuine feedback and fearless advice to achieve great things.
"

By Sam Refshauge, CEO, batyr

"We used the Harrison Assessment tools followed by a debrief with Susan, for career development with staff, which then allowed us to work with Susan to create a customised 360 degree review process. Susan has a wealth of knowledge and is able to offer suggestions and solutions for our company. She is always ready to get involved and takes the time to show her clients the capability of Harrison Assessments. "

By Jessica Hill, Head of People and Culture, Choice

"Balance at Work are the ideal external partners for us as they completely get what we are trying achieve in the People and Culture space. Their flexibility and responsiveness to our needs has seen the entire 360 approach being a complete success.
The online tool and the follow up coaching sessions have been game changers for our business. The buzz in the organisation is outstanding. Love it!
Thanks again for being such a great support crew on this key project."

By Chris Bulmer, National GM Learning and Development, ISS Australia

"We use Harrison Assessments with our clients
to support their recruitment processes. We especially value the comprehensive customisable features that allow us to ensure the best possible fit within a company, team and position.
Balance at Work is always one phone call away.
We appreciate their valuable input and their coaching solutions have also given great support
to our clients."

By Benoit Ribe, HR Solutions Manager, Polyglot Group

"The leadership team at Insurance Advisernet engaged Susan from Balance at Work to run our leadership development survey and learning sessions. Susan was very professional in delivering the team and individual strengths and opportunities for growth. Susan's approach was very "non corporate" in style which was refreshing to see. I can't recommend Balance at Work more highly to lead employee and team development sessions."